Black Widow (11 page)

I talked about the whole Bladebitch thing because I wanted my side of it out there, and because, despite our conversation of Friday night, I still felt we had to get past it. He was sympathetic, and by that I don't just mean he agreed with me, or
acted
like he agreed with me in order to keep the atmosphere pleasant. What surprised me was that he had clearly thought about the issues behind the blog, rather than merely the business of my being hacked and exposed. Too many men dismissed the blog as a catalogue of career-specific feminist grievances. Peter understood that it was really about work-life balance.

‘I once heard someone say that what you need in order to be happy is something you like to do and someone you like to be with,' he told me. ‘The first shouldn't prevent the second: that's all you're saying, isn't it? And the danger is that giving too much to the first makes you forget all the good things about it.'

From there he got me talking about happier times in my career, and I remembered the person I used to be not so long ago, the girl who was taking on the world. For the first time in ages I believed she might be coming back.

It was bucketing down with rain when we came out of the curry house, the crisp clear weather of earlier like a memory of a different day. We made a sprint to my car after I said I'd drive him home. He lived in town, but even at a ten-minute walk he'd be drenched by the time he got home.

He directed me to pull up outside a recently built residential development: twin compact blocks of modern apartments. I had passed them a hundred times and always thought they seemed corporate and soulless, though they looked toasty and dry on a night like this. My own place, by contrast, looked like anyone's idea of a cosy cottage, but it was draughty from so many little nooks that it was a bugger to keep warm.

There was a moment's silence between us after I put the car in neutral and pulled on the handbrake. It was as though we both still had so much to say but were burdensomely aware that time had run out, not only on the evening, but on a very special few days.

It felt like the weekend needed a denouement. A cheerio or a ‘see you on Monday' would have seemed so deflatingly banal. I was trying to think of something appropriate to say, but really I didn't want to talk.

Peter spoke quietly, barely audible above the music playing on the car stereo.

‘At the risk of blowing it merely by saying this, I want to kiss you. But I'm afraid if I do that, I'll break whatever magic spell is keeping you interested in me. Like the opposite of the princess and the frog: suddenly I'd be changed into someone you want nothing to do with.'

‘I don't believe in fairytales,' I told him. ‘People don't just transform into something else overnight. So kiss me.'

‘You're a life-saver,' Ali told Rodriguez, instantly regretting her choice of words. He was handing her a polystyrene cup full of steaming hot coffee. It was as welcome as it was thoughtful, but the stark reality was that nobody was saving any lives out here today.

She watched the bubbles appear in sporadic fizzing bursts upon the water's surface. The scuba team had arrived about half an hour back and hit the water by the first light of dawn. When she called it in, she was told they wouldn't be able to get there for at least two hours, so the decision was taken to hold off until morning, as their involvement was never going to be a rescue mission.

Ali had been here all night, spending much of it deafened by the sound of the helicopter as it strafed the riverbanks with its searchlight. Despite the freezing cold, she had actually broken into a sweat from shuttling up and down the slope between the river and the road, clambering over rocks and clumping through vegetation. They were combing the banks either side to see if anyone had crawled from the water and collapsed, or maybe dived from the vehicle before it hit the water.

The search had been joined by as many police bodies as they could spare, which at that time was not a lot. Their numbers were further depleted when Murdo McKay lost his footing near the water's edge and fell in. They got him out in a matter of seconds, but the terror, shock and pain on his face and the deathly blue colour of his lips was a reminder of how futile this search was likely to prove.

They got him out of his wet clothes and wrapped him in a heavy waterproof jacket Ali always stashed in the boot of her patrol car. Some shifts you were barely out of the vehicle, but experience had taught her there was always the possibility you could end up standing outside in the freezing cold for hours on end.

It was when the ground search was declared over and she no longer had the exercise to keep her warm that the sweat started to cool under her uniform and she really felt the need of that coat.

Rodriguez had driven Murdo to the hospital. There were paramedics in attendance but they had to stay at the scene in the decreasingly likely chance that a survivor was found. When he returned, he was carrying two coffees, one of which he handed to Ali.

She hugged it like it was a miniature radiator.

‘You look perishing,' he said. ‘I thought you natives were used to the cold.'

Natives, he said. He got points for that. He was going by the accent rather than her appearance.

‘There's this young polar bear,' she told him. ‘Goes up to its mother and asks, Mummy, am I a real polar bear? Mummy replies, Course you are. You've got white fur, you've got claws, you live in the Arctic and you eat fish. Why do you ask? Young polar bear replies, Because I'm fucking freezing.'

Ali didn't have white fur or indeed white skin, but she was a native born if not bred. She couldn't imagine living anywhere else, but she never got used to the cold.

‘I'll take that as a warning,' he said. ‘And I'll be investing in some thermal undies tout de suite.'

She couldn't help but wonder again what made someone swap a career in London for this. She certainly wouldn't do it the other way around. There was definitely something different about this one, though: some vibe he was giving off that she couldn't quite read.

He said he had shipped out for a completely new start after a bad break-up. That wasn't something guys tended to confide, especially not so soon after meeting you. A male of the species being open about his feelings and crediting her with the vision necessary to respond appropriately? Pinch me, she thought. And wouldn't it be typical if Mr Perfect came into her life right now.

She shouldn't kid herself, though. It was as likely he was the one with the vision to read her as a potential shambles, and he was laying down a marker from the off to explain how he was on the rebound and therefore off limits.

Ali had a dismal track record when it came to reading the signals. Her problem was an over-developed sense of optimism, combined with a bad case of confirmation bias, resulting in a tendency to imagine guys to be a lot nicer and a lot more genuine than the evidence ultimately demonstrated.

Martin had seemed nice. Martin had seemed genuine. Her relationship with Martin, however, was definitely over, even though she might be pregnant by him. In fact it was over
because
she might be pregnant by him. It had been over since sometime around midnight two Saturdays ago, when she realised he had come inside her and that he had said nothing.

The condom had split or rolled off. That wasn't something you failed to notice. And yet he had said nothing: just turned over and fallen asleep, leaving her to lie there horribly awake after she came back from the bathroom, contemplating awful possibilities.

He said
nothing
. Got up the next morning, acting like everything was normal, apart from an unusually pressing need to get out of her flat.

It was amazing how your perception of a person could change in a single crucial moment, with one glimpse of who they really were.

There was a surge of bubbles upon the surface, a black shape emerging from black water. One of the divers was hauling himself up the aluminium ladder they had temporarily anchored to the river bank. He signalled to Ali as he climbed, and she made her way across to where he stood dripping on the frost-dusted grass.

‘There's a black BMW down there,' he said, tugging off his mask. ‘No occupant. The driver-side door was partially open. I'm thinking when it hit the water he tried to get out before it sank by opening the door, which is actually the worst thing you can do. The water floods in rapid as soon as it's unsealed, and the exterior pressure prevents you from opening it enough to get out. The window was gone, though, so he must have managed to smash it and climb through once the car was submerged.'

‘Could you read the plate?'

‘Aye, though I can do you better than that. His wallet and his phone were in his jacket. I reckon either he had slung it on the passenger seat while he was driving, or he wrestled it off to give him a better chance of making the surface.'

‘And what chance would you give him of doing that?'

The diver grimaced and glanced back towards the river.

‘It looks slow because it's deep, but believe me: the current down there is bloody strong. I was kicking flat out against it just to stay in place. Put it this way, it's strong enough to have pulled the car ten yards downstream from where it hit the water before it fully filled up. It jammed against some rocks on the bottom otherwise it would have drifted further.'

‘So we'll have to drag for miles?' Ali suggested.

‘Aye, but there's nae guarantee that'll turn up a result. If we get lucky, the body might have snagged on something, but it could equally be underneath the Kessock Bridge by now, on its way out into the Moray Firth.'

‘Where's the wallet?'

He held up a damp fold of black leather.

‘My colleague will be up with the jacket and the phone in a wee minute. Found one of his shoes in there as well. Must have come off as he was trying to get out.'

Ali took it, flipping it open to reveal a driving licence inside a plastic window.

‘Hamish Peter Elphinstone,' she said, reading aloud. ‘I've heard that name recently. Can't think where.'

‘
Elphinstone
?' the diver checked, suddenly gimlet-eyed. Clearly it was familiar to him too.

‘That's right. Why does it ring a bell?'

‘Maybe because his family owns half of Perthshire.'

One of the difficulties in listening to any trial unfold was trying to maintain a sense of the chronology. Multiple accounts of various incidents would accumulate further with each new witness, potentially making it very confusing to assemble a consistent timeline. Parlabane had no difficulty recalling precisely when his involvement in this sorry business commenced, having a fairly unmissable landmark with which to orient himself. It was the day he received official notice that his divorce was finalised.

He had opened the door to the postman in a state of bleary-eyed hangover, alleviated by as much anticipation as a man in his forties could feel over the prospect of receiving a mail-order purchase. The postman handed him the envelope then held up a gizmo for his signature. Parlabane scrawled illegibly on the miniature screen and stared at the object in his other hand with curious disappointment. When the postie rang the bell, he had thought it was the new Jimmy Eat World album being delivered. That was about as big an event as he had to look forward to in his life.

Wandering back to his desk, he ripped open the envelope with a ragged slide of his forefinger, thinking of a time when he would not have countenanced such a move for fear of razor blades or hypodermic needles sent in angry revenge for something he had written. He wasn't even annoying anybody these days.

He picked up his mug of black tea from next to his laptop and shuffled towards the windows. He had been surfing in semi-darkness, but figured he should open the blinds in order to see the letter properly. As well as signalling to the world that his flat contained a conscious and functioning inhabitant who was ready for the day, it would be a sight quicker than waiting for the energy-saving bulbs to actually fire some photons. Honestly, some mornings the sun came up quicker.

‘Jesus.'

There it was, in black and white, all the more inescapably official for seeming understated. He thought the letterhead for something like this ought to resemble a metal band's logo and the body text look like it was printed in blood on a Caxton press in some ancient dungeon.

Fifteen years of his life, and decades more that he had imagined in his future: this document was the line drawn under the former and through the latter. Truth was, it didn't need anything gothic about it to seem like a headstone.

The death had been slow. It had taken years for his marriage to fall apart, and over that time he had experienced a lot of different feelings about what was happening: regret, anger, helplessness, despair, sorrow. It changed from day to day, hour to hour. Right then, though, the main one was of loss: of a precious thing he once had, and would never have again.

But as he had learned long ago, when life kicks you in the balls, it can always knee you in the face too while you're bent over.

Parlabane looked up from the letter and out of the window, his gaze taking in the newly mown lawns in the centre of Maybury Square before alighting upon the less aesthetically delightful sight of the police station opposite. Aye. That was when he felt the unique emotional splat one experiences when fate decides to burst your nose as a follow-up to having already administered a full-blooded boot in the haw-maws.

He had always known this moment was coming. Admittedly, for a while he had almost convinced himself that he could merely acknowledge how the wheel had brought him back around and that would be that. He'd been here a few days, after all. But this blow had been heading his way from the moment his mate Dunc offered to do him a favour.

He needed somewhere to stay, the short-term lease having run out on the flat he was in. He'd taken it as an interim measure, thinking opportunities might come up that would require him to move elsewhere. Wrong again.